Wednesday, 9 November 2016

Don't Panic!

Anyone remember this from 1980? That was how it felt when Reagan was elected - and yet he turned out to be the greatest US President of the postwar period. That's the thing with Presidents - you don't know what you've got till they stop being candidates and take up office. Chin up, eh?

10 comments:

Well, the difference is that Reagan appealed to the best in the American character, while Trump has pandered to the worst: xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, messianic violence. Even if his policies are more moderate than his rhetoric, the social forces he has unleashed will not be easily contained.

One concrete prediction: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are doomed as independent states. Trump has already signaled to Putin that the he doesn't believe the U.S. has a dog in that fight, and that he wouldn't interfere with Russian re-annexation. And without American leadership, I'm certain that the response of NATO wouldn't extend beyond the frantic convening of meetings.

Back in the late eighties I worked for the publisher that produced the UK edition of Trump's Art of the Deal. How we laughed at his vanity, his overweening self-confidence and his bullshit. WTF, as my teenage daughter said this morning...

Yes indeed Sophie - and I remember the bizarre Trump board game ('It's not whether you win or lose, it's whether you win'). Not a nice man, not a good man, but that really isn't the point.Hope you're wrong about the Baltic states, Waldo - can you really imagine them going back under the Russian yoke? I honestly don't think all that much is going to change - Trump will likely go native once he's in the White House, and be restrained from doing anything too mad. I also genuinely believe Clinton was a far more real threat to the survival of the US, for all sorts of reasons.

It's all about access to warm water ports for the Russians, and always has been. When Murmansk is your only sea access to the rest of the world, you go looking for better options. Access to the Mediterranean via the Black Sea is the reason they annexed Crimea, and one or more of the Baltic states are next. It will start with small incursions across the eastern frontiers of those nations, using the excuse of protecting ethnic Russians against the "depredations" of those nasty Baltic peoples. North Ossetia and Crimea were the templates.

Well, I hope you're wrong Waldo. You could also interpret the Ukraine intervention as a response to the EU's ham-fisted (and delusional) 'reaching out' to Ukraine, and Crimea as Russia foreclosing on a territorial loan. So let's hope the EU 'diplomats' don't do anything silly around the Baltic...

About Me

Nige, who, like Mr Kenneth Horne, prefers to remain anonymous, was also a founder blogger of The Dabbler and a co-blogger on the Bryan Appleyard Thought Experiments blog. He is the sole blogger on this one, and his principal aim is to share various of life's pleasures. These tend to relate to books, art, poems, butterflies, birds, churches, music, walking, weather, drink, etc, with occasional references to the passing scene.